News & Research

Students Propose Public Art for Providence

06/26/2012

Students in an interdisciplinary studio taught by Professor Ellen
Driscoll, head of the Sculpture department and an accomplished public
artist herself, are designing public art installations for the Kennedy Plaza
area of downtown Providence. Spokes of the
Wheel: Public Art in Kennedy Plaza is part of a multi-pronged city initiative to transform the
transit hub into a vibrant destination for arts and culture – a venture
bolstered by a $200,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA).

In early April the mix of undergraduate and graduate students in
Driscoll’s spring studio – majoring in six different disciplines – met with
city officials and representatives of the arts community to present “third
drafts” of their ideas for feedback. The enthusiastic critics included RISD
alumna Lynne McCormack 87 FAV, director of Art, Culture + Tourism for the city of
Providence, along with Cliff Wood and
Jennifer
Smith of Greater
Kennedy Plaza, a coalition of public- and private-sector organizations focused
on revitalizing the area.

In addition to working with RISD and the coalition, the city
is partnering with the arts organization
FirstWorks in using the NEA Our Town grant ­– one of the largest of 51 awarded nationally – to create arts
programming and draw up a master plan for the redesign of the Greater Kennedy
Plaza space, which includes Burnside and Biltmore parks adjacent to the plaza. Public art is also being commissioned from
The Steel Yard and a large fall festival is in the works as well.

“This studio is
RISD’s part of the pie,” explains Driscoll.“Our role is catalytic. We
want to open people’s eyes – delight them, surprise them, involve them – in
order to reestablish their relationship with this area of downtown Providence.

To
that end, Cody Henrichs MFA 13 SC generated a lot
of enthusiasm for his proposalto create a partial replica of the Hannah,
a colonial packet ship that ran the HMS Gaspeeaground near the Rhode Island coast in a pre-Revolutionary
incident known as the Gaspee Affair. Inspired to create a sculpture that could
double as play equipment for preschoolers like his son, Henrichs envisions the
ship’s bow and mast erupting from the grass of the small park that abuts the
downtown plaza.

In contrast, Taniya Vaidya MFA 13 PT presented her
idea for a performance piece celebrating the textiles industry, which has been
integral to Rhode Island’s history,
along with the Native Americans and more recent immigrants who have made the
state so unique. She proposes that a dozen people wearing jumpsuits and
linked by garlands of cloth flowers circle the fountain in the park and invite
viewers to participate in dyeing cloth at the site. The jumpsuits and flowers
would all be colored with a saffron-hued dye made from a combination of
bloodroot, an endangered plant used by Native Americans, and turmeric, used for
healing and cooking in Vaidya’s own country, India.

Qian Huang MLA 12 proposes making an existing black metal
fence more welcoming by extending and bending some of the bars to create
seating and mounting laser-cut silhouettes of trolleys, trains and other modes
of transportation on the fence as seat backs. Roy Smalls MLA 13 would
like to suspend a web-like map of old streetcar routes from the ceiling of the
tunnel leading to Kennedy Plaza’s skating rink, using lighting and sculptural
elements to direct viewers to look up, and to unify the tunnel interior (towards
the sky). Andsophomore Stuart Penman 14 ID proposes
placing motion-activated lights in the trees and along paths in both Burnside
and Biltmore parks, which would provide illumination to pedestrians as they
stroll through the area after dark.

As part of the
process, students in the studio investigated both the ecosystems and the
history of the area, mining their research for what Driscoll calls the “shiny
silver ribbon” of inspiration. Now that all of the projects have been approved
for further development, students will begin actualizing their ideas, with the
goal of installing – or performing – some of the art works this summer or early
fall.